Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A top Nissan official has said the company was “arrogant” in its marketing and sales approach for the all-electric Leaf, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan guarantee from President Obama’s Department of Energy.

Not that the company is going to return taxpayers their money, since the premise upon which Nissan received the loan were ridiculously high production estimates. Too much in expenses would have to be eaten otherwise.

“We were a little bit arrogant as a manufacturer when we went to the 50-state rollout,” said Al Castignetti, Nissan’s vice president for sales, to Automotive News in late November. “We had assumed that there were people just waiting for the vehicle who would raise their hand and say, ‘Give me a Leaf, give me a Leaf, give me a Leaf.’”

JC summary: The leak of the SOD was a good thing; the IPCC still has the opportunity to do a much better job, and the wider discussion in the blogosphere and even the mainstream media places pressure on the IPCC authors to consider these issues; they can’t sweep them under the rug as in previous reports.

A new paper published in The Journal of Climate admits that climate models are greatly exaggerating the likelihood that global warming increases tropical cyclone activity or intensity. According to the authors, "temperature trends in NCEP [the National Center for Environmental Protection database] are unlikely to be accurate, and likely drive spuriously positive TC [tropical cyclone] and PI [potential intensity] trends, and an inflated connection between absolute surface temperature warming and TC [tropical cyclone] activity increases." Indeed, as observations show no increase in global cyclone activity.